Experiences Organising the Phoenix Cricket League

How many times has it happened to you that you are dissatisfied with certain things and think you could have handled them better? You feel you could have taken a better decision than the manager or would have changed some policy to ensure better efficiency. These things happen to everybody.

Last year when I was playing in the Phoenix Cricket League, I faced a similar situation. I was not happy with certain decisions that were made by the organising committee and in some cases why a decision was not being made. So when the opportunity came this year, I decided to take the initiative and organise the Phoenix 20-20 Cricket League.

Given below are some steps I followed. Many of these steps are generic and can be used for any event planning. These steps reflect the approach I adopted in organising this event. I would be thankful if anyone can suggest some ways on how I could have done things differently to achieve a much better result.

Initiative:-

The first step in any event planning is taking an initiative. However, before taking an initiative one should atleast have a basic idea of what the event is about. What is the targeted audience? What are some of the common issues?

As a regular player of the Phoenix Cricket League from the last 4 years I had good understanding of the functioning of the league. So that made it easier for me to take up the job.

Delegation:-

Since organising a league is time consuming and involves a number of tasks, my first goal was to find the right people for each task. I decided on finding and delegating tasks to people who were responsible, shared my visions and can give constructive ideas. As a manager of the local Chandler cricket team and a regular player of the league, I had an idea of whom to call. With just a little bit of convincing I was able to find two friends who were not only interested in joining the organizing committee but were also passionate about it.

Task Breakdwon :-

We broke down our entire task into 3 parts with each part to be handled by one of us separately. This gave everyone a sense of responsibility and also allowed us to incorporate our own ideas, while working as a team.

1) Financial - Responsible for deciding the tournament fees, collection fees and fines , and purchasing inventory and trophies.

2) Marketing - Responsible for placing ads, distributing pamphlets etc so as to develop public interest. Also responsible for getting sponsors and coordinating with them.

3) Governing Policies - Developing rules of the tournament, resolving controversies and general day-to-day functioning of the event.

Problem Identification and Analysis:-

The next thing that we set about to accomplish was to jot down on a piece of paper, a list of things that went wrong the last season and those that went well. This gave us a fair idea of which areas we needed to concentrate more. There were two major problems that we highlighted -

1) Difficulty in maintaining player interest over 6 months
2) Absence of neutral umpires and hence controversies during games.

The cricket league goes on for nearly six months and if there is no means of communication about how different teams and players are performing, people start losing interest. A points table is just not enough to maintain interest. Therefore we decided to have a website which would, in addition to the points table, also keep track of the performance of individual players and give them rating points based on their performance as batsman or bowler. It would also have the entire scoresheet and individual match reports which would help maintain player and public interest. We also set about a criteria for the best bowler and batsman of the tournament.

The second issue of neutral umpires was more serious. Although everyone tries to be honest and plays for fun, sometimes there are controversies and heated exchanges during the game. Over the years we have had controversies due to the absence of neutral umpires and umpires have been accused of favoring their sides. Previous organising committees had asked for neutral umpires every year from the non-playing teams, but their have always been defaulters. We thought of adopting a stricter stand on this issue. We decided that the only way we can pursue individuals from a third team to come and umpire a game, is either through incentives or through penalties. We decided on implementing both - a) gave financial rewards to the umpires, and b) applied penalty points to teams that didn't sent the umpires on the scheduled date. This has had a great effect and the worry of losing points has forced captains to be more responsible in sending their players for umpiring.

Documentation:-

It is very essential to have a proper document explaining all the policies. A lot of things can be said and conveyed in emails, but if we have an official document listing all the policies it makes one's job easier. In case of controversies, we can always show the document, and say - "Hey! Its written here in the rules. You did not follow the rules so we cannot do anything."

We created a rules document listing all the policies and also came up with a requisite amount of tournament fee based on the expenses calculated.

Presentation and Approval:-

Then came the most important part of sharing our ideas with the captains of all registered teams. As expected, we were praised for certain initiatives while we faced backlash for some of our other proposals. The captains also questioned us with certain scenarios and asked our policies if those issues came up during the course of the tournament. We had to quickly come up with solutions to those and added them to the rules document as addendum. However for certains issues which only affected a couple of teams, we had to come up with the famous "Divide and Rule" policy, which asked the affected teams to show up with majority vote to have a policy change.

After a few policy changes we were able to convince everyone.

Implementation:-

We were able to start the tournament in October and things have proceeded swiftly since then. There were a couple of issues in between but have been able to easily handle those based on our preparation earlier. As of now things are working pretty smoothly.

It has been a good learning experience and I have been able to learn a lot of things. If I reflect back there are a few things that I could have done a little differently at the start of the tournament, but I believe thats what experience is all about. Hopefully the league works properly and ends on a good note.